The Southern Robert Mills.

Kibler, James Everett, Jr.

Altogether American: Robert Mills, Architect and Engineer, 1781-1855, by Rhodri Windsor Liscombe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. $45.00.

THIS, THE SEVENTH BOOK-LENGTH STUDY OF MILLS, surveys the whole of his impressive achievement, particularly his work in Washington, where he created "an architectural heritage worthy of comparison with the contemporary developments in the capitols of Europe and Britain." Liscombe strives hard to emphasize the "Altogether American" part of his book's title and how the growth of the strong central government marked progress. In a related minor key, the book also implies that "sectional forces" constituted a "blight." This political philosophy colors the volume's judgements, large and small.

Liscombe's tendency to toe the Federal line and to make Mills "Altogether American" sometimes gets him into unnecessary trouble. For instance, he calls the placename Union, South Carolina, a "patriotic name." Actually, Union was named for the Old Union Meetinghouse, which, in frontier days in the 1700s, united three denominations under one roof. As for "patriotic" Unionism, Union's historian has written: "Union was very secession-minded; there was no union sentiment in Union."

Not always knowing the specifics of Southern place which figured so strongly in Mills's South Carolina training and sensibility causes other such problems. The book consistently spells Cheves as Cheeves. Charleston's Mazyck becomes Mazyack. The South Caroliniana Library is incorrectly placed on Bull Street, the location of another library. Such errors are perhaps small things, but are indicative of a potential disregard of local particulars in favor of the out-of-scale abstractionism symbolized so well by the new cast-iron dome of the Federal city.

At times, the reader might have the feeling that Altogether American must have indeed been commissioned on some great government grant. Would a book with the opposite slant or political philosophy have ever seen the light of day in the big way of Oxford University Press? We must wonder. Its transparent orientation no doubt endeared it to the current Academic press, tangled in the octopus tentacles of current Academic-Government political correctness as so many presses are.

Even though Liscombe's political orientation suffuses the work, the alert reader can see in Altogether American a very convincing study (unintended) of how Washington increased dramatically in power during Mills's sojourn there and some of the damaging results thereof. Mills was an insider, feeding at the public revenue trough himself. (He went from the little pig-trough of State government to the bigger and better hog-trough in Washington.) We see how Mills's patron, President Jackson, was intent on pushing through an ambitious building program in Washington as the capstone to the many federal commissions he had set in train across the states, and how with money at stake, retainers, or potential retainers, got pettier and greedier. We see how the pork was being dished, especially to Baltimore, D. C., New York, and New England, and how government could be used as an effective tool for local economic enhancement. Why plant corn when you can use government as an improved row-crop? Government-harvest, after all, has the added advantage of performance from the comfort of an office--and without sweat. We see how Unionists like Mills were the ultimate, if often unwitting, underminers of the dream of the Jeffersonian republic. For all his "Altogether Americanism," Mills was tossed aside in Washington as a result of rivalries and the rude jostlings of architectural firms to get the snout in the trough (rooting other little piglets out). Mills was one of the piglets rooted out; and he did no doubt suffer the stroke which killed him when he got the news he would not be awarded the contracts for enlarging his own previously built Washington buildings. It is an altogether tragic story for Mills and for the country. Liscombe does not write this story, but an alert reader may very well.

Liscombe even provides some salient features of such a story's plot. For instance, in the year 1824, exports of rice, cotton, and indigo totalled seven million dollars. Of this sum, farmers paid one seventh, one million dollars into the Federal treasury, for the Federal tariff, revenue which in turn was "laid out to the advantage of the Northern states." And as Liscombe further points out, "ninety percent of the federal revenues right up to the time of the Civil War, derived from customs duties." What wonder that the Southern farmer would have cause to say, "The Government takes from us all they can get, and do not spend a cent among us." What wonder that newly elected President Lincoln, the arch-Unionist, would say when asked if he would let the South go, "Then where would we get our revenues?" This newly written, dark, "Altogether American" tale based on Liscombe's work might have the better ring of familiar realism to the Southern ear, an ear that has been taught by history to be suspicious of a "patriotic" big-government line.

As for Mills's art, it should be stressed that he designed structures to be compatible with their built environment, to fit into and augment their particular community rather than affront it with the self-assertive desire to display individual genius and ingenuity. Mills's genius and ingenuity were "Altogether Southern" in properly valuing tradition and community. Mills's South Carolina architecture, in particular, reinforces and augments its community landscapes. His designs never exhibit the arrogance of "Look at me; see how ingenious and original I am." Mills saw his own place as fitting into the continuity of his community's built environment. He properly valued community and its traditions. Liscombe's interpretation too often comes from the modern perspective of the anti-traditional, from a time of abstraction and "Progress" above all else, when all good lock-step progressives must celebrate innovation instead of the quiet adding of individual accomplishment as complement to the particulars of place and anchored community.

If the architect is to create a work which is organically compatible with its surroundings, it is absolutely essential for him to know place in more than a superficial way. Mills knew South Carolina well; the buildings he designed for his native state are his best architectural creations. He ornamented his native community of Charleston by blending his art with it, rather than violating it. Modern architecture in our landscapes is often brutal in its disregard of its surroundings, by not respecting scale, by not using local building materials, by not considering the climate, by not seeing the architectural traditions of that place, already in place. Standardized impersonal architectural style (an "International" style) would set its buildings down anywhere without regard to the particularites of that place. This attitude grows out of more than willful ignorance. It is a blatant flaunting of the values of place. The "Progressives" love abstraction and innovation-for-the-sake-of-innovation, after all. Tradition is their enemy. Such "Progressivism" is the bratty assertiveness of the modern who feels that his own time is the pinnacle of achievement, and that the past has nothing to teach him or to offer. This feeling might be styled an "Altogether American" view. It is certainly "Altogether UnSouthern," and Mills did not share it.

Picking up the architectural elements around them, Mills's Charleston buildings blend especially well and harmoniously with their neighbors, without affronting them by "doing their own thing." In the friendly coexistence of his structures with their surroundings, we see Southern neighborliness and strong sense of community, as if to say we desire to get along, to live and let live--"Altogether Southern" and "Altogether Anti-Progressive-American."

The praise of successful architecture should strongly involve whether or not it honors its place, whether the architect augments his environment (built or natural), or merely screams for attention with the discordant and shocking. Mills's architecture would be a consummate model for current architects in seeing how an artist must grow from place and revere it. The good architect must first have proper knowledge of that place over the abstract concept of Art as "Home," a fatal philosophy which would allow Art to function without regard to the place where the Art sits. Without such a true sense of place, the result becomes the fragmentation and discord of Modernism which is destructive of continuities and contexts and relationships, and ends in extreme isolation, confusion, narcissism, discontinuity, and dislocation. Most modern "Altogether American" architecture is an architecture of violation, that does violence to place and community--a standardized style with arrogant total disregard of the concreteness and particularities of place and community. Modern architecture grows from the worship of roofless, isolated, abstracted self, and the various modern presumptions that accompany such self-worship. While it is altogether admirable to describe Mills as the major American architect he indeed was, this should not be attempted at the expense of an "Altogether Southern" sensibility which would allow the proper valuing of place, community, tradition, and one's part in the continuity of human endeavor.

We also see in Mills the desire to connect to a tradition of European architectural excellence of harmony and proportion. Mills and his friend Thomas Jefferson admired Palladio and adapted him to a Southern climate by projecting his porticos outward in order to provide shade. It is altogether important to understand why Mills and the Charleston architects who preceded him so greatly admired Palladio's rural architecture and what it represented. In this regard, Liscombe's book does not even ask the right questions, much less provide answers. It is not enough to note that Mills "obviously" regarded his Southern Palladian designs of "raised porticos and associated motifs ... as essentially American." If so, why? And why did the Palladian style find such fertile ground in the South? These are essential questions for yet another volume on Mills, a figure of very great significance, as Liscombe and others have persuasively demonstrated.

JAMES EVERETT KIBLER JR

University of Georgia